The Van Gogh Museum ended 2014 extremely well with a record number of visitors, a spectacular new presentation and a fast-growing online fan base. The Van Gogh Museum attracted more than 1.6 million visitors in 2014. This is an increase on the previous year, despite the fact that the Kurokawa wing was not accessible to visitors as a result of the construction of the new glass entrance building at the side of Museumplein. Compared with 2013, this is an 11% increase.

The museum’s permanent collection can always count on great enthusiasm from all visitors, particularly since the spectacular new presentation of the collection was introduced during the year. The Félix Vallotton: The Fire Beneath the Ice exhibition and the Emmy Andriesse photographic exhibition were also very popular, as were the successful Friday Nights.

Despite the many visitors, the museum was perceived as being less crowded. Thanks to the online ticket sales with starting times (12% of the entire number of tickets sold), the museum can facilitate more visitors through improved visitor distribution. The majority of visitors are from the Netherlands (17%), Italy (12%), France (10%), US (9%) and Great-Britain (8%).

The extended opening hours, the extra evening hours on Fridays and Saturday in particular, also result in greater distribution: in addition to the regular Friday Nights, the museum was also open on Saturdays until 9.00 p.m. during the months of July and August; this relatively quiet Saturday night primarily attracting many Dutch visitors. The Friday Nights with their special peripheral programming are immensely popular (an average of 1,000 to 1,500 visitors per evening).

The renewed museum website was launched in 2014 and it immediately won the web design award Developer award and an Honorable mention from awwwards.com. Visitors to the renewed website can now discover the entire collection by means of high-quality images which can now be viewed full screen. The website focuses on the colourful stories about Vincent van Gogh and the museum collection, unravelled in many different ways. T The website was visited 2.7 million times in 2014.

The online Van Gogh Museum network also expanded exponentially: the fan base on Facebook increased from 200,000 to 500,000, on Twitter from 75,000 to 100,000 and as many as 4 million Van Gogh fans follow the museum via Google+. Consequently, the museum holds a leading online position in the Netherlands, and with Google+ it even holds the number 1 position among museums worldwide.

The Museumplein – with the newly reopened Rijksmuseum, the new wing of the Stedelijk Museum, the programming of the Concertgebouw, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and the new presentation of the Van Gogh Museum – has a unique overall appeal and also attracted a huge number of visitors in 2014. The cultural institutions at the Museumplein jointly attracted almost 6 million visitors during the year.

The number of people visiting Amsterdam – and in turn the museums – has increased. The Tourist Barometer of Amsterdam Marketing showed a 4% increase in the number of museum visitors in Amsterdam until the end of October 2014. But the Van Gogh Museum showed that it outperformed its surroundings. The realised growth of +11% is sharply higher than the average growth of visitors to the Amsterdam museums during the same period (+3%), the attractions (+4%) and Schiphol (+7%). The growth is the same as the increase in hotel overnight stays in 2014 (also +11%).